RELIGION IN FRANCE.

Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 101, 9 April 1907, Page 6

RELIGION IN FRANCE.

The announcement that Mgr. Cabrieres, Bishop of Montpellier, would deliver m Notre Dame the sermon that was to signalise the teamination of the Plenaory Council aroused considerable curiosity among the people of Paris. The Bishop of Montpellier is an " irreconcilable," as regards the Separation Law. Yet Notre Dame de Paris was anything but overcrowded. The vast majority of them were there from sheer curiosity, m expectation of a sensational declaration.

In the nave and aisles the scene during the whole time the service lasted was sometimes disorderly, and always indecorous. Hundreds of spectators mounted their chairs and the barriers to catch a glimpse of the gaily-dressed bishops and archbishops. Not the least lively m the crowd were nuns and " sisters" of various orders, -who came m great numbers, and who also mounted their chairs and laughed — half audibly and discreetly — aiiid giggled m their efforts to keep steady. Falling to hear the preaching or disappointed by its lack of sensation, by its absolute banality, "les fideles" strolled about the great church and gossiped with their friends. The Bishop's sermon was nothing but a statement of the cardinal doctrines of the Catholic Church, an assertion of the rights of Pope and Bishcps as sole guardians of the faith, and an expression of hope m the peaceful solution of the present orisis. The sermon was delivered, not from the pulpit m the nave, so that the congregation might hear it, but m the choir to the assembled Bishops and to the few front rows of the congregation. The scene bore a startling resemblance to the scene the other day m the Cathedral of Tournay, where the Pope's legate presided over the Eucharistic Congress. Upon the scene m Tournay the Catholic ' Matin ' has a leading article which may well cause serious concern at the Vatican. " Not a sign of the three virtues of Faith, Charity, Humility," says this article, "was discernible m the gorgeous ceremonial; nothing but worship of the Pope m the person of his Legate Cardinal Vanutelli, nothing but incessant genuflexions and changes of robes. No fraternity and equality was there between those gorgeously arrayed bishops and the assembled multitude of lay people shut off from them by iron barriers. No equality, but caste; no humility, but hierarchical pride. The whole thing was a parody of true religion." The article, written by a fervent Catholic, is a merciless onslaught on Vaticanism and all its worldly pomps. "It is Roman fetichism," says the article, "not the Catholic religion." It winds up by inviting the Catholics of France to take their religious administration into their own hands, "to separate the wheat from the chaff," to free "the Christian idea from the Roman fetichism and Csesarism which obscure it," to " return to the pure tradition of the Apostolic Church." — Paris correspondent 'Daily News.'